The Loveliest Girl by Barry Rachin (100 best novels of all time .txt) 📕

from reference books at the Scarborough Public Library and shooting the breeze with some of the local yokels.
Rising from the white sand, he pulled off his sandals and began walking in the surf toward the pier in the far distance. Cassie - a.k.a. Typhoid Mary with the lascivious grin - would be just settling into work about now. She could infect the entire boardwalk with pestilence and never losing a minute's sleep. How had he missed all the cues? She was crass and vulgar. In the course of a single week, she could fornicate with a dozen men and still find time to spread the creeping crud to one more unwitting soul. At face value Cassie Moffat seemed the sweetest thing, but as with sea gulls that didn't really live off the sea, first impressions counted for nothing.
Smoke and mirrors. Nothing was ever what it seemed to be. When they exited the Mel Libby Chocolate store, Felicia Fitch said "I want to show you something precious." Reese was preoccupied with his soggy crotch. He wanted to go straight home to die or rot away to a pus-covered heap of nothingness. But he followed Felicia across the parking lot to a stand of huge willowy grasses bordering the rear of the candy store. "What do you think?"
"Yes, very nice. The plants resemble those tall reeds with the brown seed pods that grow in marshy bogs."
"Yes, but this is a grass," Felicia protested. "See how it's gone to seed at the top?"
The slender green stalks rose ten feet or more in the air to a sandy-brown plume of fuzzy seedlings."Why are you showing me this?" His penis was beginning to throb again and his underpants felt ridiculously wet. Did he have to pee again? Would there be another profusion of needle-sharp blades slicing his urethra to a tattered mess that vaguely resembled the elegant plant's tasseled crown?
"Oh, I don't know." Felicia turned back in the direction of the car. "It's such an astonishing plant. I thought you might find it interesting."


Cassie didn't show. Reese sat in his room waiting for the clandestine showdown with the female Antichrist but the girl never resurfaced. By now his genitals were in complete disarray. He wrapped a wad of toilet paper around the offending party in an effort to staunch the flow of putrid pus. Peeing was abject torture followed by a solid ten minutes of residual scalding agony. Eventually the pain subsided but only until the next time.

"Reese, let me in." An insistent pounding at the door announced Cassie Moffat's belated arrival. The digital clock on the night table read one in the morning. He opened the door, and the girl brushed past him as though she was a long-term resident of the Scenic View Inn. "We gotta talk."
"Funny you should mention it." Reese shot back sourly.
"I got this little problem." She rushed ahead without waiting for a response, "It's a gynecological thing….Chlamydia." She sat down on the bed but almost immediately jumped up again. "I'm almost a hundred percent cured now, but my doctor says that anyone I slept with ought to take precautions. Just follow the directions on the label."
Only now did Reese notice the white paper bag she was clutching in her left hand. Reese took the bag and removed a plastic container. Ciprofloxacin.
"Boy, you sure are a mess!" Cassie was ogling the mass of yellow blotches peppering his underpants. Reese slumped down in a chair and began to cry. "What's the matter?"
"I'm sorry," he blubbered.
"For what?"
"For damning you to hell,..for being a holier-than-thou shithead."
"I give you the clap and you're apologizing to me?"
"You said it was Chlamydia."
"Same difference," Cassie brought him up short. The girl wandered over to the card table where the IBM Thinkpad lay closed. "Looks like you're making progress with the book."
"How's that?" He wiped his cheeks dry with the heel of a hand.
Cassie gestured at the wastepaper basket. "No crumbled sheets."
"Nothing's really changed. I switched over to the laptop."
Reaching down she fished a paperback out of the trash. The book looked as though it had hardly been read. In response to her questioning look Reese said, "It wasn't very good. You can take it if you like."
Cassie flipped the book back into the trash. "Never was much of a reader." Easing down on the bed, she draping an arm over his shoulders. "I'm not a bad person," she said meaningfully. "I just do a few things that ain't a hundred percent kosher. There's a difference."
Reese was still having trouble catching his breath. "I'm only just beginning to figure that out."
Maybe next time around I'll hit the jackpot and find a swell guy like you." The girl brushed his cheek with her lips and slipped quietly out the door. Reese filled a cup of water from the sink and shook a green pill into the palm of his hand from the cylindrical, orange container. First thing in the morning he would call and cancel his appointment with the doctor.

Reese found the paperback at the Bargain Book Outlet sandwiched between a New York Style pizza concession and sleazy joint that sold barbecued pulled beef sandwiches. On his meager salary, he had little spare money but bought the book for two reasons: it was priced at three dollars in the 'remaindered' bin and the author, a Canadian woman with a huge literary following, was touted in one of the dustcover blurbs as being 'the modern-day heir apparent to Anton Chekhov'.
Despite the glitzy hype, none of the stories read like the Russian master. It was chick-lit pulp fiction masquerading as serious prose. The plots were thin and shot through with just enough sex, violence and perverted mayhem to create the illusion of a serious fiction. Putting her considerable writing skills on automatic pilot, the author was simply preaching to the choir. Midway through the fifth story, in blind rage, Reese hurled the book, full force, across the room. It careened off the microwave, ricocheting into the crate where he discarded his dirty clothes and underwear. After calming down, he retrieved the book and dropped it in the wastepaper basket. "So much for Chekhov's heir apparent," he muttered.
But something else had happened as he was perusing the famous Canadian writer. Toward the bottom of the third page Reese noted a smattering of purple prose. The writing was had become affected - overly ornate, extravagant. Perhaps the author was trying to dazzle the reader with her considerable skills but the strategy fell flat. Even if Reese still had nothing tangible to show for it - not even a single finished piece of short fiction - the boy was beginning to understand the demands, what was required of a mature writer. Without a single finished story, he was beginning to develop his own values.

The second week in August, three new housekeepers were hired and Reese went back to general maintenance full time. Cassie's antibiotic knocked down the infection within the first three days to the point where he had no more pain or pussy discharge. His 'little friend' was back to normal. All was right in the world. Felicia stopped by his room one night after work. Her mother wanted to know if he could help out with a pool party planned for the weekend. "I want time and a half."
"Really?" Felicia's normally deadpan expression lightened. "She doesn't indulge me and I'm her daughter." Noticing the outdated laptop computer, she ran her thin fingers over the keyboard. "My mother gave you this?" Reese nodded. "It was my brother's. Two years this November, Joel was killed in a car accident." The somber expression deepened several shades. "She hasn't been the same since."
When Felicia was gone, it occurred to Reese that nothing was ever quite what it appeared to be. Cassie pulled herself out of the D Street gutter only to land face down in a similar pile of effluvia several hundred miles north in Old Orchard Beach. And yet, the ever-resourceful girl still managed to find a doctor and bring Reese the medicine. That took guts! And Mrs. Fitch blustered about the Scenic View Inn like some crotchety bitch on a stick. Who knew the woman was heartbroken? Grieving? It flew in the face of logic, not to mention every law of God and nature, for a mother to bury her child.

Labor Day was approaching. Toward the end of August, Reese made his way down to the boardwalk. He found Cassie just finishing her shift at the sweatshirt boutique. "This is for you... a little, end-of-summer, going away present." Reese reached into a bag he was carrying and pulled out a slab of Len Libby dark chocolate. Breaking it in two he gave her the larger piece. "It's from the store with the life-size, chocolate moose."
"That's so sweet!" She raised the chocolate to her lips. "How's the writing coming?"
"About the same." The Ferris wheel fifty feet away was spinning at a dizzying clip. "It's an organic process. You inch along in fits and starts." Reese was staring at a T-shirt with a naked woman sitting in a martini glass. He wasn't quite sure how to interpret the crude message. "Ever heard of the Western writer, Louis L'Amour?" Cassie shrugged. "During what he called his 'yondering years' L'Amour joined the circus and became an elephant handler. He also worked as a fruit picker, longshoreman, coal miner and lumberjack. The man even skinned cattle on a ranch in Texas."
"Well that's something!"
"L'Amour lived with bandits in Tibet and served on an East African Schooner. He was also a professional boxer and won fifty-one out of fifty-nine matches."
"Okay. What's your point?"
"That comment you made about hoity-toity college professors riding the MBTA, red line train into Boston…" Cassie's face clouded over trying to decipher his intent. "The crusty old farts with their tweed jackets and leather elbow patches," Reese added in an effort to jumpstart her memory.
"I say a lot of foolish things on any given day," the girl hedged. Using her top teeth for leverage, she snapped off another piece of the dark chocolate. "This is really good stuff - not like that cheap shit they sell on the boardwalk."
"I don't envy them," Reese said, picking up the thread of his previous remark.
"Envy who?"
"The nerdy professors you saw commuting into the city." He looked her full in the face. "I may lack the daring of Louis L'Amour, but the comfortable respectability of patched elbows and penny loafers leave me cold." "Do you remember," Reese deflected the conversation elsewhere, "that dark haired girl you spoke to at the Scenic View?"
"The skinny one with the dark glasses?"
"Felicia said you have the loveliest smile and a very nice way about you." Reese watched the Ferris wheel gradually lose speed as the ride wound to an end. The cars at the top swayed abruptly backwards when the machine finally creaked to a stop precipitating a outburst of childish hoots, giggles and squeals. "She has a very nice way about her," Reese repeated. "Those were her exact words."
"Do you share Felicia's sentiments?"
"Wholeheartedly!"
A young boy nibbling on a cone of cotton candy scampered by. "There must be a reason you're telling me this." When there was no immediate reply, she added, "I want to show you something." She led the way down the causeway leading to the ocean. The tide was out, but a handful of families with small children were clustered close by the surf.
Cassie waved her hand fitfully at the beachgoers. Reese felt her body leaning into him but there was nothing suggestive in the act. "What I've been doing - it's an